In our current public dialogue, people don’t often encounter our position on global warming, so when they do, they can find it surprising, even “baffling,” as one website visitor on the second day of COP21, the UN climate summit in Paris, put it. But if they take the time to investigate why we hold our position, we think they’ll at least no longer be baffled, even if they’re not persuaded.

If we were persuaded by the empirical evidence that human use of fossil fuels was causing global warming of a magnitude that would generate harms that exceed the benefits of the energy derived from those fossil fuels, we would support the effort to reduce fossil fuel use to reduce the warming to reduce the harms.

Instead, we are persuaded by the empirical evidence that human use of fossil fuels causes very little global warming, the benefits of which probably exceed the harms of which, while the benefits of the energy derived from those fossil fuels far outweigh whatever net harms might arise from the slight warming their use causes.

Notice the stress on empirical evidence. The only grounds for fears of dangerous manmade global warming are predictions made on the basis of computer climate models of how the world’s climate responds to increased atmospheric CO2 concentration. But as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman famously put it, if our prediction “disagrees with experiment it is wrong.”

One could go into enormous detail comparing model predictions with real-world observations, but the summary is this:

• On average, they predict twice the warming actually observed over the relevant period.
• Over 95% predict more warming, not less, than actually observed. If their errors were random, they would as frequently predict less as more. That they don’t implies that their errors are not random but driven by some kind of bias, whether intentional and dishonest or unintentional and arising simply from misunderstanding, widely shared among the modelers, of how the climate system works.
• None of them predicted the complete absence of statistically significant global warming stretching back 18 years and 9 months to February of 1997.

In short, the models are wrong. They therefore provide no rational basis for any predictions about future global average temperature, and consequently no rational basis for any policy related to such predictions.

Empirical study shows that many earlier periods in Earth’s history were significantly warmer than even the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts the next several centuries to be on the basis of those computer models, yet the warming during those periods was not only not catastrophic, it was positively beneficial. Human and other life has always thrived better in warmer than in cooler periods.

“Climate change” (the shorthand substitutes for—and obscures the meaning of, and therefore hides the need for strong empirical evidence for—“dangerous manmade global warming,” and the rhetoric is intentional) is indeed real. It has happened throughout Earth’s history. Global average temperature (GAT) has risen and fallen in various longer and shorter natural (mostly solar and ocean current) cycles superimposed on each other.

Even if we attribute all increase in GAT since the Industrial Revolution (about 0.8˚C) to human action (and it is extremely unlikely that we should), that increase amounts to less than one-fourth of the difference between present GAT and GAT estimated to have prevailed during the Holocene Climate Optimum (note the last word in that name), and less than 0.33% of the range from 0˚K to 330˚K (the hottest natural air temperature recorded on Earth). In short, the amount of warming human use of fossil fuels is causing or will cause is essentially irrelevant to environmental quality and human wellbeing.

This means that even embracing the IPCC’s predictions our position still makes sense. There simply is no empirical ground for thinking the warming we might cause by using fossil fuels will cause catastrophic consequences, or even harms that exceed benefits.

The risks from poverty far outweigh the risks from climate. People even moderately well off can thrive in any climate from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara Desert. The poor cannot thrive even in the best tropical paradise. No society has risen out of poverty, or can stay out of it, without abundant, affordable, reliable energy, and the best means of providing that is through fossil fuels.

That’s a very brief summary of the case for our position. You can learn much more by reading these items , all by excellent scholars in the climate science, energy and environment and development economics, and theology and ethics addressed in them:

• A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor 2014: The Case Against Harmful Climate Policies Get’s Stronger
• A Renewed Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor
• The Cost of Good Intentions: The Ethics and Economics of the War on Conventional Energy
• A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming
• An Examination of the Scientific, Ethical, and Theological Implications of Climate Change

That nearly 400 people, including 154 with doctoral degrees, 100 with master’s degrees, and 95 with bachelor’s degrees, and including 21 climate scientists (14 with doctorates), have signed An Open Letter on Climate Change to the People, their Local Representatives, the State Legislatures and Governors, the Congress, and the President of the United States of America suggests that our position is at least not “baffling” but rather worth careful study before reaching a conclusion.